Enos Mills, Father of the Park
Near Estes Park, Colorado
If one person deserves the credit for turning these mountains into a national park, it is a slight, quiet man named Enos Mills. Born in Kansas in eighteen seventy, Mills came to Colorado as a sickly teenager and fell completely in love with the high country around Longs Peak. He built a cabin nearby, became a mountain guide, and taught himself natural science by living in the wilderness he loved.
Mills grew convinced that this landscape of glacial valleys and towering peaks should belong to everyone, forever. So he became a tireless campaigner. He toured the country giving lectures, and he wrote thousands of letters and articles urging Congress to protect the area as a national park.
He battled competing interests every step of the way. His persistence paid off. On the twenty sixth of January, nineteen fifteen, President Woodrow Wilson signed the bill creating Rocky Mountain National Park, protecting hundreds of thousands of acres of peaks and valleys between Estes Park and Grand Lake.
Newspapers of the day, including the Denver Post, called Enos Mills the father of Rocky Mountain National Park. He died in nineteen twenty two, but the park he fought for is his monument.
